Tuesday, June 07, 2005

deep ones dream

Some people probably don't know what a Deep One is. I will explain.In the 1920's a man named HP Lovecraft, who lived in Providence, RI, wrote a loosely-connected series of supernatural/horror stories which now define what is known as the "Cthulhu Mythos." (For more information, put "deep one" or "Cthulhu Mythos" or "HP Lovecraft" or any combination of the three into a search engine.) The most famous of these was "Call of Cthulhu" ("In his house dead Cthulhu lies dreaming"). One of the many races Lovecraft described were Deep Ones. These are intelligent, aquatic humanoids (something like the Creature from the Black Lagoon in looks) which are related to humans and can breed with them. Most writers portray Deep Ones as pure monster, but I have always been fond of them and written about them more sympathetically.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I was in my dream for a while, and then I wasn't. In the beginning, I was in my friend Christine's car (she has a Dodge Neon) with a 3d person (who, don't know). We were uptown at the stop light in front of the post office trying to go left, but they were cutting down trees (from where I don't know, there's no trees around there) and the way was blocked. I guess Christine was trying to bring me home. She did some kind of crazy turn and went down Center St, only it was all snowy and she started skidding and the next thing we knew, we were up on the sidewalk in a way that shouldn't have been possible because of the parking meters (which don't exist in real life). The car is too wide to fit between the parking meters, but we were on the sidewalk! So we had to drive down the sidewalk to get to the next street.But we didn't go to my house. We ended up in this very strange place. It was like a little peninsula or tongue of land into a swamp. There was a nice house, kind of Victorian but not really, and behind it a shop. I thought it was an ideal set-up, and I liked the house, which was long and low for a Victorian. (What a Victorian Painted Lady would look like if you built one in a swamp, I guess.) The shop had all kinds of things I like: t-shirts with sayings and pictures on them, wind chimes, dream catchers made with parrot and wild bird feathers, jeweled sun catchers, etc. This is where I vanish from the dream, left happily browsing in this store.The woman in charge of the shop looked like Marge Simpson, but she was a person, not a cartoon. There was a man there too--her son, or nephew, some kind of relation.The swamp appeared to be full of alligators (or crocodiles--I never understood what the difference was!) but the people from the shop didn't seem afraid, although they did watch the gator-crocs closely. The giant reptiles would show just the tops of their heads above the water-never their bodies, rarely their tails. And they weren't the regular black-green color, they were different colors. No, correction. They were the black-green color underneath, and then they had almost like highlights of other colors. The one I remember most had red mottling.Others were browsing in the shop, trying on clothing, etc. Someone said something about the gator-crocs and the woman responded, "Those aren't gators, they're deep ones."All the people in the dream knew what a deep one was, and everyone went to the water's edge to look (pretty stupid thing to do). The woman explained that for some reason, Deep Ones liked to breed in this swamp, and there were many rare hybrids. (Hybrids with WHAT? But hybrid just seemed to imply the various colors, not that they were cross-breeding with other species.)The red one was especially active. It would come to the surface, look around, and submerge again. Apparently these Deep Ones did not come onto land much, or attempt to communicate with the people in any way except to watch each other.By this time, Christine, our passenger and I had probably left. We just weren't in the dream anymore.The man who lived there started hitting on one of the women who was shopping. He tried to kiss her, and her breath was extremely foul, so instead he had sex with her, right there on the Deep One's beach. (well, not a beach, more like a sloping river bank) The Marge lady saw what was going on and didn't say anything. Later on (the next day maybe?) she caught them having sex again, and there was an enormous Deep One watching, one so big she assumed it was actually a gator-croc for once and not a Deep One. She said to the man, as he was having sex with the woman (still not kissing her due to her breath), "maybe you should ask her on a date."The enormous Deep One was golden in color, with little or no black-green underneath. It was some kind of next generation hybrid-hybrid and possibly something like a queen (like in Alien), very powerful and very smart.